Protesters form a picket line outside the Giller Prize award ceremony on Nov. 18, 2024.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
With the world blowing up, you may have missed the implosion of the Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week in Australia – which has become yet another artistic casualty of the Israel-Gaza war. Since Oct. 7, 2023, many arts organizations far beyond the Middle East have been challenged by deep divisions caused by the war, sometimes to the point of existential crisis.
In Canada, the most obvious example of this is the Giller Prize, which has been the target of oppositional open letters and protests. The issue: Ties to Israel by the Giller’s former title sponsor Scotiabank; another now-former sponsor, the Azrieli Foundation; and Indigo Books owner Heather Reisman. The Giller announced last year that it was parting ways with Scotiabank, and then made another big change this week: Canadian independent booksellers will comprise its jury, rather than authors, which has stirred up a new controversy over diversity.
Back to Australia for a moment, where this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week has been cancelled after a Palestinian-Australian writer was disinvited last week, prompting the withdrawal of more than 180 others and the resignation of AWW director Louise Adler in protest. The majority of the board also stepped down. A nightmare.
The now-former board rescinded the invitation to Randa Abdel-Fattah, saying it would not be “culturally sensitive” to include her so soon after the Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre. The author and academic is a strong critic of Israel. Some have pointed to controversial comments she made after the Oct. 7 attacks, including that “armed struggle is a moral and legal right of the colonized and brutalized.”
But to many, it seemed like Ms. Abdel-Fattah was being dropped simply because she is a Palestinian who is critical of Israel – an outrage.
“I think when we look back on this history, we will see a master class in poor governance, an act of cultural vandalism,” Ms. Adler told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
On Thursday, the festival’s new board issued an apology to Ms. Abdel-Fattah and Ms. Adler. “Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right,” it said.
But Ms. Abdel-Fattah herself had signed a letter in 2024 calling for New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to be dropped from the same festival, due to offence over his column, “Understanding the Middle East through the Animal Kingdom.”
Former board member Tony Berg is accusing Ms. Abdel-Fattah and Ms. Adler of having “actively undermined freedom of speech in the past.”
A debacle. And who loses? The readers who had hoped to see writers speak about books – and the authors who won’t get to do so in Adelaide this year.
There has been a lot of hand-wringing in Canada as well over the potential loss of the Giller Prize, after executive director Elana Rabinovitch said last year that if the organization didn’t receive federal funding, it would fold by the end of 2025. With anonymous funders, that didn’t happen.
The Giller announced the jury change this week. Was this a way to avoid the embarrassment of having authors resign from the jury, as they have the past two years?
Ms. Rabinovitch told me by e-mail that the new jury composition has nothing to do with the post-Oct. 7 controversy; it’s something she’s been contemplating for some time.
Giller Prize jury to be made up of booksellers, not authors, for first time
But the jury’s lack of cultural diversity is causing new upset. “It’s shocking that they chose an all-white jury,” Anjula Gogia of Toronto’s Another Story Bookshop told me.
When I asked Ms. Rabinovitch about this, she wrote: “We searched out many bookstores across the country and ultimately went with those that had the broadest geographical and community representation and had the widest selection of Canadian literary fiction.”
That explanation is not going to suffice for BIPOC booksellers like Ms. Gogia. She was not invited to participate – but if she had been, she would have said no.
“What I would have said to them is, I would welcome an opportunity to have a process of reconciliation, and I’d be very happy to be part of that process. But that has to happen. Because right now, what this has been called is bookseller-washing. This has not solved any problem that the Giller Prize has had over the last two years. It does not move things forward.”
Ms. Rabinovitch says to her knowledge, no booksellers declined to participate because they didn’t want to be associated with the prize.
A plea – and I make this as someone whose own appearance at a book festival last year attracted letters of protest: We must ensure literary spaces are inclusive and encourage intellectual debate and diverse voices. We must not seek to censor well-meaning, serious artists, but to invite them in and respectfully challenge opinions that rankle (although there should be no place for actual hate). To allow discussion about their books and beliefs. That is the value of a literary festival, a literary prize, and books themselves.